What is Winsnare? “Virus” Removal

Pieces of software like Winsnare “Virus” usually affect the popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Explorer or the default program you are using to browse the web. These programs are commonly known as adware and are specialized in displaying different types of ads, pop-ups, banners, and sponsored messages. The potential browsing interruptions and disturbance they can create can be really irritating for some users, and a good reason for them to remove the annoying program from their system. But how exactly can this be done? Let us show you in the removal guide below.

What is Winsnare “Virus” and how does it function?

Winsnare “Virus” is an adware program, which is known for messing up the browsers of many users and causing them an online disturbance. To save them from this disturbance, on this page, our team decided to give a bit more information about the specifics of Winsnare “Virus” and a detailed removal guide, which can help you effectively uninstall it from your computer. This program usually becomes part of your browser, by installing a special ad-generating script, which displays a huge amount of ads, pop-ups, banners, and different promotional notifications. Its main activity is to flood your screen with these ads every time you open your default browser, so that you eventually click on some of them. This practice can be quite intrusive and is part of one aggressive method of online advertising known as Pay-Per-Click, where different ads of products, services and sites get displayed directly on your screen with the idea to receive paid clicks from you. Usually, this brings income to the Winsnare “Virus” developers thanks to this remuneration model and helps them advertise their goods and make sales.

Is the adware activity legitimate or its part of a criminal scheme?

Adware can be intrusive and it may heavily interrupt your normal browsing with its unstoppable flow of ads, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that this software is illegal or malicious. All ad-generating pieces of software are completely legal and so is Winsnare “Virus”. These programs serve the need of the online advertising industry. They can display different sponsored messages, cause some sluggishness in your browser, use some of your CPU and RAM resources for their aggressive ad generation activity, but generally they cannot pose a security risk to your system and your privacy. Sometimes, the adware owners can use the program to collect some information about the users’ browsing habits and implement this data in their marketing campaigns, but still, this is far away from what a real computer virus can cause. A real virus or malware from the rank of a Trojan or Ransomware, for example, is really something that can give you a reason to be worried. Such threats can compromise your machine, blackmail you, steal your credentials, corrupt your data or your files and a bunch of other harmful activities. None of these can be performed by a program like Winsnare “Virus”. And even though many people prefer to uninstall it for its annoying effects, the adware is basically a harmless piece of software.

How can Winsnare “Virus” get installed on your PC without your consent?

A lot of users feel tricked by the way adware gets inside their machine. Such software usually distributes itself in a bundle with some other attractive program or a free application. It can mostly be found on different freeware or shareware platforms, torrent sites, in spam messages and emails with attachments, pages, which contain adware, drive-by-downloads or automatic installers. When people download such bundles, they usually make a critical mistake, which often lands them software like Winsnare “Virus”. They frequently skip reading the EULA or customizing the setup and simply proceed with the Quick or the Standard installation feature, which installs the complete bundle as it is. This is something we strongly discourage. To prevent adware or any other potentially unwanted software from getting installed on your PC without your consent, you should always customize every new setup. It doesn’t take much time, and the only thing you need to do is to check for options like “Advanced” or “Custom” and use them instead of the Quick/Standard ones. This usually opens up a menu, where you can see all the programs included in the given bundle and manually disable the ones that you don’t need on your PC. Such options can be very useful for preventing not only adware and different nagging programs, but can also help you spot and remove some nasty viruses, Trojans or Ransomware infections, which may be lurking inside the setup.

Winsnare “Virus” Removal

I

Before you begin completing the steps from the following guide, we advise you to place a bookmark on this page or have it opened on a separate device since some of the following steps will require you to close your browser.

Open the Task Manger by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Go to the processes/details Tab and take a look at the resulting list. If you see a process with the name of the unwanted program or looks shady, right-click on it and select Open File Location. If you believe it is part of the infection, delete the files.

III

Use the Winkey+R key combination to open the Run window and in the search field type appwiz.cpl. Hit Enter and in the resulting list, look for recently installed programs that look potentially unwanted. If you find anything – uninstall it.

IV

Re-open Run and this tie type msconfig. Hit Enter again and in the resulting window, go to the Startup tab. See if there are any shady programs there and if anything looks suspicious uncheck it and then select OK.

V

In the Start Menu search field, copy-paste the following line: notepad %windir%/system32/Drivers/etc/hosts . Open the first result and look at the bottom of the file where it says “Localhost”. If there are any IP addresses below that, tell us what they are in the comments since they might be coming from the unwanted software.

VI

Type Network Connections in the Windows search field and click on the first result. Right-click on the adapter that you are using at the moment and go to Properties > Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IP) > Properties.

If the DNS line is not set to Obtain DNS server automatically, make sure to check that option.

Now go to Advanced > DNS tab and remove everything in DNS server addresses, in order of use.

VII

Right-click on your browser’s icon and select Properties. Delete everything in Target that is after .exe”.

For Chrome users

Close Chrome and go to this folder: C:/Users/*Your username*/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data. Change the name of the Default folder to Backup Default. Re-open Chrome.

For Firefox users

Open Firefox and click on the Main Menu > Add-ons > Extensions. If you see anything suspicious there, remove it.

For IE users

When you open the browser, go to Tools > Manage Ad-ons and remove the unwanted software if you see it there. Next, go to Tools > Internet options and change the homepage URL to whatever you are normally using.

VIII

Open Run (Winkey+R), type Regedit and click on OK. Next, press Ctrl+F and type the malware name. Hit Enter and delete everything that gets found.

If there are no results from the search, manually visit those folders in the Registry Editor.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/Main

If you find there any suspicious keys that have names with a lot of random letters and numbers, delete them or if you are not sure, tell us in the comments what you saw.